Yet another US Soccer Federation concept...

[gordie_delini 42]

No.

No to...what?

[gordie_delini 42]

slight improvement? - using your suggestion, kevin - sort of

[Bradbury 203]

I like the ball in the latest version best. It sneaks in a star without cluttering the badge with too many "3D" stars. A few thoughts:

- I don't know if it's just me, but I think the gold outline is just a little bit to thick.

- The colours are slightly too dull. Maybe brighten them a teeny, tiny bit?

- Also, maybe to avoid doing stars that represent, well, nothing (like 3 random ones in the middle of nowhere), could you try to sneak in 13 stars for the original colonies? They would not be frivolous stars, and they wouldn't clutter it up like 50 would.

Very nice job, Gordie. You get a gold star!

[Mockba 1,675]

No.

Nice feedback. No, really.

-----

Stars between the letters still look a little big for my taste, but I love that hybrid star/pentagon shape.

I do like the 13 star idea, but I'm not sure how you'd do it, unless you did US(circle of stars)SF or somesuch.

[AJM 114]

slight improvement? - using your suggestion, kevin - sort of

This version is tops! Definately like USSF versus just "United States". Stars are a bit more subtle, but are okay inside the crest. The majority of countries that win the WC add the star outside of the actual crest. Coupled with the kits, this would be a great identity for the US to adopt. Any GK kits?

[SG30 14]

slight improvement? - using your suggestion, kevin - sort of

^^Thats some amazing stuff. Try thinning out the gold outline a little.

[BallWonk 2]

This version is tops! Definately like USSF versus just "United States". Stars are a bit more subtle, but are okay inside the crest. The majority of countries that win the WC add the star outside of the actual crest. Coupled with the kits, this would be a great identity for the US to adopt. Any GK kits?

I agree about the kits. But I'm gonna dissent on the USSF and the stars. First off, I'd rather see "United States" than USSF. Nobody has ever said, "The USSF wins and advances to the Round of Sixteen!" The governing body is the USSF, but the team represents the United States, and I don't care what the rest of the world puts on its badges.

But accepting the switch to USSF, I still don't like the stars. They add too much visual clutter to what was, in earlier drafts, an admirably clean top-of-crest look. Stars or letters. Not both, and certainly not stars acting as punctuation marks.

In fact, I would rather see the stars gone from this entirely, at least for the men's uniforms. Put a couple of stars above the crest for the women (and fingers crossed, leave room for a third, assuming the US women play the next two games as well as they played the last half against England today). The bold white letters in the blue stripe admirably create the right look-and-feel of a USA crest. Putting stars in the red-and-white stripes confuses the symbolic language of U.S. national iconography; they look like championship stars rather than the stars in the canton of the flag.

I love the general look-and-feel of this, even if I'm nitpicking details. Perfect shades of colors, and perfect balance between them on the crest. A really interesting concept.

Finally, I must point out that: One, red jerseys with a stripe = England; and Two, blue has traditionally been the national color of the United States. Goes back to the War of Independence, where the bad guys (England!) wore red, and our boys wore blue. I'd much rather see you reverse out the red and blue in your uniform concept.

[gordie_delini 42]

BallWonk - crest according to your suggestions:

[gordie_delini 42]

Revised kits:

[penguin20 0]

try using last years man u kit as the template

[gordie_delini 42]

Hell no to using any type of Man U design. As an Arsenal supporter, I refuse.

[penguin20 0]

it would look something like this

[VitaminD 2]

Great idea, but I'm not sold on it just yet.

Any way to make the ball larger relative to the wings? It's a great idea, and it shows up well when the crest is blown up and you can see everything up close. But on the concepts where it's placed on the jersey, all you see are wings. You can't even guess as to what's in the middle, and that's a shame.

As for the stars, I know we have them on our flag, and they're part of American symbology, but I'm wary of putting them on a soccer kit, where stars are trophies for winning the World Cup. Once we win a Cup, we can throw stars on there, but it does a bit of a disservice to those nations that have actually won the World Cup for a non-winner to display stars.

[Mockba 1,675]

My counter-arguments to BallWonk would be the crests used by Brazil, Argentina, Germany, Uruguay, France, Italy... and I'm working off the top of my head here. Most teams tend to use the crest of their national organizations, so you could argue that that's what gordie is creating here. Then again, you could add "Soccer Federation" under the bottom of the crest for non national team applications, so I guess it's either or.

I don't have the aversion to the stars, given the fact that the stars are such a major part of the national flag and the national team's nickname, the "Stars and Stripes." Other nations that prominently feature a star, such as Ghana (nicknamed the "Black Stars"), don't shy away from it, why should the US?

As for Vitamin D's ideas, I think I agree. I could see the ball being pushed down a little and made bigger, then angling the wings up a bit more, only slightly going out of the crest outline.

For the kits, I'm still not really sold on the diagonal stripes, but that's because I really really really like the vertical stripes they're currently using. I am glad to see that you went back to white/navy/white instead of all white, I really think they should solidify that as the primary kit combination.

[cyandlux 0]

No.

No to...what?

The wings are goofy.

Does it say USA or nike Flight?

The badge is very vertical and the wings horizontal.

Gold outline is too thick.

No seperation between wings and badge.

Text in general looks like an after thought.

No color balance....not enough red.

[mcrosby 2,102]

just an idea, if you're gonna try and fit 13 stars in, try putting them outside the badge, one on the bottom point, then six on each side, just an idea, other than the star dilemma i like the overall idea

[gordie_delini 42]

Okay, so I've enlarged the ball in the middle a tad - hopefully it makes it more noticeable on the kits. Again, penguin20, I'm not going to use a ManU template, if for nothing else it's last years' style. Kevin, since you're so fond of the vertical stripes, I think I'll give that look a go.

[VitaminD 2]

just an idea, if you're gonna try and fit 13 stars in, try putting them outside the badge, one on the bottom point, then six on each side, just an idea, other than the star dilemma i like the overall idea

Stars inside the badge is a sticky enough situation in the world of international soccer for some of us. Putting a dozen or so stars outside the national badge would be a very bad idea until the US wins 12 World Cups.

[mcrosby 2,102]

can't we just pretend they won 13 or so cups, not many people in the US would argue with it, considering most in the US dont care to know how many the US has actually won, moreless understand stars in a soccer badge, moreless ever see a soccer badge in their lifetime

[VitaminD 2]

can't we just pretend they won 13 or so cups, not many people in the US would argue with it, considering most in the US dont care to know how many the US has actually won, moreless understand stars in a soccer badge, moreless ever see a soccer badge in their lifetime

Fellow American:

Understand that we make up only 300,000,000 people in a world with over 6 billion humans. These "others" are grouped into nearly 200 countries not called the United States of America. Almost all of these "foreign countries" have national soccer teams. As hard as this is to fathom, some of these foreign teams are better at soccer than we are! (Shudder to think, I know; worse still, they call soccer "football" even though that's the name of our kick-a$$ game over here! What gives?) But it's true. It turns out that some of these other teams had the audacity to win a tournament wherein the winner was declared world's champion. One of the perqs of winning this tournament - the one you'd prefer to lie about and say we won, though we didn't - is that you can forever commemorate your accomplishment by affixing stars to your national uniform, near the crest. So while we in America don't need to validate our worth by winning some silly series of soccer matches, these other countries really seem to make quite a fuss over it. Your ruse would certainly go unnoticed by the vast majority of your fellow Americans, but I have the feeling that the billions of "others" would probably be miffed that we'd just go affixing stars to our uniforms and try to pass it off like we won these tournaments, when in fact we have not. I'd bet that those "others" probably have records of who actually won what, and when - so it'd be pretty hard to pretend that we actually won 13 World Cups. In fact, no country has even won half that many... but I just know if they'd had more Americans on their team, they'd be well on their way to 13 titles by now. Right, citizen?

Hard as this may seem, good citizen, but some people find Americans... well, arrogant. (I know! Where do they get off, huh?!) It would likely be looked upon as arrogant to go lying about false accomplishments, especially to the people who've actually accomplished those things. They seem to have an eye for details like that.

So to sum up, while we may be able to fool our compatriots, there are undoubtably non-Americans who would not look kindly on this transgression. They're more pissed at not being American than anything else, but let's not give them another reason to be jealous. Let them have their silly stars, and rest safe in the knowledge that we'd totally kick their ass in hot-dog eating or monster truck rallying. USA!! USA!! USA!!

SARCASM-FREE TRANSLATION: . Are you serious?

Edited September 23, 2007 by VitaminD